Written by

TERRI HALLENBECK
Burlington Free Press

BURLINGTON, Vt. -- Dr. Diana Barnard recalls a patient of hers, a woman who was dying from a progressive disease. What the woman really wanted was to live and see her young children grow up, but given the reality of her illness, she hoped to die at home.

Instead, she spent her final months in a long-term-care facility.

"It was so distressing to her. She would have traded for a peaceful death in her own home with her children around her," said Barnard, an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine and an attending physician on Fletcher Allen's palliative ...